Word: pits
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Other boys were joking about it as they left the hall, but Pit sat down by himself to think it over. He felt far from being a Christian, decided to do nothing about his pledge, just wait and see what would happen. What happened was that the local Episcopalian minister, who got Pitney's pledge card from Evangelist Sunday, spoke to his mother, and Pitney honored his word by joining the church. "If it hadn't been for that, I don't know when I'd have joined, if ever," he says...
...same year, Pit's well-developed sense of responsibility gave him another nudge. An earnest young man from Princeton Theological Seminary turned up at Penn Charter one day to recruit delegates to a youth conference. When he asked for volunteers, he was greeted by stony silence; when he asked if anyone would like to hear more about the conference before making up his mind, the silence became even stonier. Desperately, the seminarian asked if any boy would agree to receive promotional literature just in case someone might develop an interest, and at this point Class President Van Dusen spoke...
Islands of Inactivity. In Van Dusen's day at Princeton (it was also F. Scott Fitzgerald's day), the contemptuous tag for fellows like Pit was apt to be "Christ-er." Pit spent two summers as counselor at a Princeton-run camp for underprivileged children, and became so interested in social problems that he followed up some of the families during the school year. He joined a boycott of the undergraduate eating clubs, in a vain attempt to force them to offer membership to any and all upperclassmen. Exclusion, he maintained, was "undemocratic and un-Christian...
Undergraduate Van Dusen captained the Debating Team, headed the Undergraduate Council, the Bric-a-Brac and the International Polity Club, was valedictorian, Ivy Orator, Phi Beta Kappa, and an active member of the Student Christian Association. But for all sober purpose about him, Pit Van Dusen, when he graduated in 1919, still did not know what he wanted to do. The law, of course, beckoned, "but something made me hold back from it." He toyed with the idea of being a social worker, "although it was, and is, primarily a woman's field." His approach to the ministry...
...field roared into the last hour, only 28 cars were left. A Cunningham-owned Ferrari was out with a bad oil line; Cunningham's Cunningham drove up for a pit stop, and when water was poured into the radiator, it came out the exhaust pipe: the engine had blown a gasket. Cunningham looked at the steaming water from the exhaust and walked away, laughing. ("What else can you do but laugh when that happens...